These may look like real fossils, but they are actually perfect plastic replicas of 2 million-year-old whale skeletons made using a 3D printer. This printing technology, which can create 3D versions of objects as diverse as a guns or the brain of a man with no memory, was hyped last week by President Obama when he said that 3D printing “has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.” The technology certainly saved the day for Smithsonian paleobiologist Nick Pyenson. Pyenson had been finishing up a research trip in Chile in 2011 when he decided to check out a local highway construction site in the Atacama Desert where workers had supposedly uncovered dozens and dozens of whale skeletons. “I didn’t really believe the rumors at first,” Pyenson says. But when he arrived, “It was unlike anything I’d ever seen.” Pyenson described the experience at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston. Local museum officials were racing to dig out the skeletons before highway workers paved over the area, Pyenson says. Although the skeletons clearly needed to be removed, a problem with removal is that spatial information about different constellations of fossilized bones is then lost. This information is essential for answering all sorts of interesting research questions, such as why so many whales died and were buried together two million years ago. For example, the whales could have swum into a bloom of toxic algae and died or they might have fallen victim to a landslide. Pyenson went home to DC and immediately recruited the Smithsonian’s in-house 3D imaging and printing team (aka the Laser Cowboys), who came back with him to Chile and spent a week imaging the whale fossils with a high resolution laser scanner. The team then went home and began analyzing the fossil images. They also also began printing out awesome replicas like the one you see above, which is many times smaller that the original. (The whale fossils span between 20-30 feet in real life.) Pyenson says the Smithsonian has industrial partners who will soon print out a full sized version pro bono, which would have otherwise cost the museum $1 million. It seems Pyenson’s team has already figured out why all these whales died but he’s staying mum about it, while the scientific paper winds its way through the peer-review process—so stay tuned. Once the discovery is published, Pyenson says they’ll put the data online so others around the globe can access and analyze it. Although this laser scanning and 3D printing could give researchers around the world the ability to study skeletons without physically handling them, old-school...

Dear eBay, I love you. Yours Sincerely, Conservation Science I’ve been conducting a rather unconventional poll. It consists of a single question posed to unsuspecting conservation scientists, typically during conference coffee breaks or at the hotel bar thereafter: “Um. So have you ever bought anything on eBay… I mean, for your scientific work?” What’s amazing is that researchers working with cultural heritage objects as diverse as Picasso paintings, plastic sculpture & toys, and digital art have all answered “yes.” Plastics: So that awesome photo of the Barbies in the sample holder? Several of the PVC dolls were purchased by Matija Strlic on eBay for the Heritage Smells! project. He’s part of a team of researchers trying to find a way to diagnose the health of plastic and paper artifacts in museums and archives by sniffing the gases that percolate off the objects. When a plastic (or paper) artifact begins to degrade it produces breakdown gases. But before Strlic can build a hand-held electronic nose that museum staff can then use to assess the health of their collections, his team needs to develop the analytical tool on old, non-valuable plastic objects. And that’s how he started buying Barbies on eBay. Picasso and friends: Between 1900-1950 many contemporary artists (Picasso, Miró, Kandinsky) began experimenting with using the newly invented industrial wall paint called Ripolin for their artwork instead of hoity-toity artist paint. According to Francesca Casadio, this was for a couple of reasons: First: It dried faster than the professional artist paint—a useful feature for procrastinating painters working on deadline. Second: Using industrial paint was a snub to the stodgy art world who wouldn’t dream of using anything but traditional oil paints. Third: Some artists liked the glossy finish of industrial paint. In trying to find a way to identify a painting produced with industrial paint, Casadio needed examples of Ripolin paint from the early 20th century to practice on. And so she turned to eBay… Digital art: Since the advent of computers and other forms of electrical recording technology (such as audio cassettes or video), artists have been using this media to produce artworks. But how do you watch art stored on an old floppy disk, or on a Commodore 64’s hard-drive, or on a now obsolete form of Bulgarian video? You need the hard-ware and you need cables to connect that hard-ware to a compatible screen. Leo Konstantelos told me it’s the esoteric cables that are sometimes the hardest to find. But he’s been successful on—you guessed...

I’m looking forward to moderating a session on art and artifact science at the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) conference this Saturday morning from 10:45 am – 12:15 pm in the Liffey B room. If you’re in Dublin at ESOF, do stop by! Here’s what you’ll be in for… (the shortened version of my pitch to ESOF): When you mention art or cultural heritage science, most people think about authentication of a priceless masterpiece or identification of a pigment on a Rembrandt or a da Vinci. But cultural heritage scientists are doing this and much much more: They’re helping to conserve and restore everything from spacesuits to plastic sculptures. They’re developing tools to study artworks and artifacts without actually touching them, so that you can tell if Picasso produced a particular masterpiece with hoity toity expensive artist paint or industrial wall paint. They’re getting into the minds of ancient cultures by recreating their recipes for everything from hair dye to incense. And they’re dealing with what some call the digital art crisis: how do you preserve or conserve art that employs obsolete hardware or software, or art that is stored online in fleeting formats or impermanent platforms. Here’s who’s speaking at the Culture Lab session: Matija Strlič is a senior lecturer at the University College London’s Centre for Sustainable Heritage. He’s involved in all sorts of fascinating projects, from the AHRC/EPSRC-funded Heritage Smells!, which is about detecting the chemical makeup of gases emanating off artifacts to figure out degradation taking place inside, to the EU Joint Programming Initiative called ‘Cultural Heritage and Global Change.’ He’s developing technology to visualize damage in art and artifacts before it is visible to the naked eye. Costanza Miliani is a staff researcher at Italy’s CNR Institute for Molecular Science and Technologies. She’s also responsible for MOLAB Transnational Access, an EU-funded, roving crew of conservation scientists that travel around Europe providing scientific support to museums and galleries around the continent. In the last couple of years, MOLAB has worked on everything from frescoes in Florence’s Santa Croce Basilica, to Van Gogh’s sunflowers in Amsterdam and rare Aztec documents in Liverpool. In her own research, Miliani develops new non-invasive analytical technologies to study dyes, pigments, binders and their breakdown products. Philippe Walter has been a long-time scientist at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, a research facility located underneath the Louvre in Paris. He’s now taken an academic post at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie. Walter has been involved in a potpourri of interesting projects: From researching the Mona Lisa’s complexion using non-invasive, portable technology, to recreating ancient recipes for ancient Egyptian and Grecian cosmetics. Leo...

One of the coolest talks I saw at the ICOM-CC conference in Lisbon last week came from Jens Stenger, a conservation scientist at the Harvard Art Museums in Boston. He had the tricky task of figuring out what to do about five paintings by Mark Rothko in the museum’s collection that were so damaged from sunlight exposure that crimson paint on the canvas had turned to blue. If just a tiny corner of the paintings were light damaged, museum staff might have considered retouching the artwork with a little paint. But a massive fraction of the massive panels were seriously light-damaged. And these days the trend in art conservation is to minimize interventions on art, especially contemporary art. So a team of curators, conservators and scientists decided that, “repainting was NOT the way to go,” Stenger said. But everyone thought museum visitors would want to know how the artwork had looked before the light damage. So what to do? The solution Stenger came up with is pretty cool: Figure out the exact coloration of the originals. Display the artwork as is, but set up a digital light projector that can cast an image on to the canvases. This projected image temporarily makes the paintings appear as they did when Rothko finished them in 1963. Switch off the projector and the paintings are returned to their current-day states. It’s effectively restoration with an undo button. (And as an aside, the amount of light delivered by the projector is not sufficient to continue to harm the painting.) But like most things in life, this seemingly simple solution took a lot of work. First off, Stenger wanted to know more about why the paintings had faded so dramatically. In 1988 Paul Whitmore reported that the fading crimson red paint in the Rothko paintings had been a synthetic pigment called Lithol red mixed in with a bit of ultramarine blue. Lithol red is a problematic pigment to begin with, Stenger said, but the fading due to the excessive sunlight exposure was probably exacerbated by the fact that Rothko mixed the red with ultramarine blue. It turns out ultramarine blue can also catalyze bleaching of Lithol red. Next up, Stenger looked for photographs of the original paintings, so that the team knew exactly the colors in the painting before fading. This way they could project the right color of light on to the old canvases. Luckily, color film ektachrome images of the Rothko canvases had been taken in 1963, Stenger said. The bad news is that some of the blue pigments in the ektachromes had faded, distorting the colors in the ektachrome image so...

I spent most of today learning about what museum scientists and conservators are doing to keep contemporary art in tip-top shape. (This whole week I’m at ICOM-CC, the huge art conservation science conference currently taking place in Lisbon.) These folks who are developing life-extension treatments for some pretty quirky art and artifacts. I’m talking about gigantic chandeliers made from hundreds of illuminated plastic bags suspended from the ceiling, each bag containing a little electronic toy dog that barks and moves its legs. Gotta love it. Or they’re working on sculptures made from random objects covered in aluminum paint that are now degrading beneath the metal veneer. Or Nazi typewriters found at bombed Gestapo headquarters. Over lunch one Danish conservator told me he once had to restore the cast of a female body made from pizza dough that had cracked with age. The restoration strategy involved making pizza dough in the restoration lab and carefully inserting it into the sculpture. A great talk today was about the artist Dan Flavin who made light installations in the 1960s from fluorescent light bulbs that he had bought at the hardware store. You’d think that when the bulbs burn out, it would be pretty easy to replace them with new ones since we still use fluorescent lighting. The problem is, modern bulbs emit different colored light than the bulbs in the artwork, giving the light installations a completely different look. So researchers led by Francesca Esmay at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum are now tabulating the exact wavelengths emitted by his original bulbs so that conservators can know the artist’s original light palette, and possibly try to find ways to replicate it. Another great talk today was on magnetic tape conservation. If you’re under thirty, your experience with cassette tapes is probably limited to the hipster wallets you can buy on etsy. If you are over thirty, you probably still have a mixed tape–or several–full of songs that elicit intense nostalgia for your (possibly) misspent youth. If you’re a conservator of musical archives, thoughts of magnetic tape probably elicit feelings of panic. Researchers, such as Peter Weibel at the Center for Art and Media, have predicted that art forms stored on magnetic tape will be completely lost to the world within the next decade, due to degradation of the tape. Because of this, many archives want to digitize sound stored on magnetic tape. But if you’ve got thousands and thousands of tape reels, how do you know which ones to digitize first? Probably the ones closest to being completely unlistenable, right? And how do you assess imminent unlistenability? That’s where Elena Gómez-Sánchez comes...

If you ever get a sinking feeling that all your photos and correspondence stored digitally may one day be lost in a computer crash or due to some future software incompatibility, then you might empathize with the folks who spend their professional lives thinking about ways to ensure digital forms of cultural heritage don’t disappear into the ether. In fact, yesterday and today, people concerned with preserving digital 3D visualizations of ancient sites and other digital cultural heritage objects are meeting in London for a conference entitled Visualizations and Simulations, organized under the POCOS (Preservation of Complex Objects Symposia) banner. I’m not there, but many of the talks piqued my interest, such as the one about the Villa of Oplontis project. This is a 3D, navigable model of a gigantic Roman era villa near Pompei. The villa was so enormous that the archeologists trying to excavate the site 20 years ago never managed to find its limits. The villa had at least 99 rooms and a 60-meter swimming pool. For comparison: An Olympic-sized swimming pool is 50 meters long. Although excavators never did find the villa’s perimeter, they did acquire an immense amount of architectural information about the place. This is being used to develop what sounds like a cool 3D digital model of the villa. Art historian John Clarke is one of the leaders on the Oplontis project. He told me (by email) that his team is ensuring a good lifetime for all the digital recreation work by building a database of archival and photographs of the site, at very high resolution, just in case better software is developed than what they are using—and presumably in case there is some future incompatibility. Saving the raw data in an accessible place is a priority for Jenny Mitcham, a curatorial officer for the UK’s Archaeological Data Service. This mega database holds “a wide range of digital objects, from the simple to the complex” including digital images, databases, spreadsheets, GIS, vector graphics, geophysics (of various types for both land-based and maritime), photogrammetry, laser scanning data, 3D visualizations. (I had to look up photogrammetry. Wikipedia says it’s “the practice of determining the geometric properties of objects from photographic images.” Apparently it’s been used since the 19th century to do everything from measure tornado speeds to enable police forensics or archeology.) One cool application of photogrammetry is the VENUS project, where folks are building new tools for virtual exploration of deep water archeology sites. Here’s the deal from the website: “Underwater archaeological sites, such as shipwrecks, offer extraordinary opportunities for archaeologists due to their low light, low temperature and a low oxygen environment...

About the Safety Zone

The Safety Zone covers chemical safety issues in academic and industrial research labs and in manufacturing. It is intended to be a forum for exchange and discussion of lab and plant safety and accident information without the fanfare of a news article.